"You told me that before," I said mildly. "I did, too. How well did you know her?"
"Well, she worked for us for a while. That's how Dell got to know Teenie. I mean, he knew who she was from school, because we all know each other, right? But he probably never would have spent time with her if Miss Helen hadn't worked at our house. That's how he got to know what she was really like. Then Miss Helen got to drinking so much she didn't get to work on time, and Mom had to let her go, and hired Mrs. Happ to help. But Dell and Teenie were sneaking off to see each other by then."
I'd heard pretty much the same thing from Hollis.
"Then Mr. Jay, Jay Hopkins, he beat Miss Helen up, and I heard my mom and Uncle Paul arguing about whether we should get Miss Helen back to work in the house. Uncle Paul said Miss Helen was sober and deserved a second chance, and Mom said after what she knew now, she wouldn't have Helen back in the house for love nor money. Especially love, she said."
"What do you think she meant by that?" I asked. With Mary Nell around, you wouldn't need a tape recorder.
"I have no idea," the girl answered. "I never did understand. I think my mom thought Miss Helen took something from her. But they wouldn't tell me." Familiar bitterness tinged her voice: the teenager vs. the adult world.
"Mary Nell, could you drop me back by my car?"
She sounded a little hurt when she told me she could.
I'd been too abrupt; but I had to think, and I knew Mary Nell would keep on talking as long as I was available to be her audience.
Once I was by myself, I felt both visible and vulnerable. I drove to my motel by the most direct route and shut myself in the damn room with the damn green bedspread. I had no messages. I couldn't decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing. My leg was tingling, as it sometimes did, and I peeled off my jeans and rubbed the skin, with its fine tracery of purple spiderwebs. Cameron had called me Spiderwoman for a while, before we'd figured out that the branching lines weren't going away. My stepfather had been fond of ordering me to show the leg to his friends.
Hollis never mentioned it. Maybe he didn't understand it was lightning-related. Maybe he thought it was a birthmark of some kind and didn't want to hurt my feelings.
I lay down on the bed. SO MO DA NO, I thought. It might almost be the chorus to a Caribbean song. Okay. Reverse it. ON AD OM OS. NO DA MO SO. Dams, moon, soon, mad, mono, moans, nomad. Damon, doom, moods. Amos. Samoa? Nope, only one A. Why one A? Every other phrase ended with O.
Okay, what if the second letter was some... condition? What if the first letters stood for names? S could be for Sybil, D for Dell, N for... oh, Mary Nell had said her dad had called her Nelly. That could be N. But then, who was M? No one's name started with M, that I could recall. D could be for Dick Teague, if not Dell.
For the first time, I wished that I could ask questions of the dead. I could only take what they gave me. They gave me a picture of their deaths. They gave me what they'd been feeling at the moment. But they never told me why, or who, just how.
A bullet in my back... an infection in my lungs... my heart stuttered and quit pumping... I was just too old and worn out... the car hit so hard... the fall was from too high... I picked up the razor blade... I couldn't breathe, couldn't breathe, my inhaler was too far away... the meat lodged in my throat... the virus traveled through me and laid waste to my body... the knife traveled through my liver, then my stomach, then...
The dead all had stories, but they never explained or condemned. I'd heard, on odd little message boards that I visited, that some others like me—people who'd been French-kissed by electricity—could see the dead, could even communicate with them. No one else had confessed to having my truncated sort of relationship with those in their graves. There were lightning-struck people who could see the future, who now walked with a limp, who were blind in one eye. One woman had said no one in her family would help her right after she'd been hit because they were convinced she was charged with electricity. On a more private board, a board with far fewer members, a man in Colorado Springs posted that he was accompanied everywhere he went by his dead brother, who'd been killed by the same lightning bolt. No one else could see the brother, of course; his family had even had him committed for a time.
I stayed in my room all night. I ordered a delivery pizza. Hollis called to tell me he was working that night, all night, and to remind me to call him if I needed anything. I got one heavy-breathing anonymous call, a call I figured came from one of the teenage boys who'd confronted me. Paul Edwards called to tell me he was sorry about my brother's "situation," and he offered to help me in any way he could.
Since it was his cousin who had arrested my brother, I was pretty sure there would be a conflict of interest there, but I thanked him politely. He hinted that he wanted to come over and hang around with me. I turned him down, much less tactfully.
He was handsome, and he was a lawyer, and I could probably use a handsome lawyer friend, but Paul Edwards didn't offer to come hang around with a woman for no reason at all. He wanted something, and maybe it wasn't sex. He didn't seem to be a constant lover. The relationship between the lawyer and Sybil Teague wasn't clandestine, yet here he was with his ulterior motives.
I got a few hours' sleep that night, which was more than I expected. I drank coffee in the room. It wasn't good, but I didn't have to face anyone to drink it. I couldn't have eaten anything, so a restaurant was a waste of time.
I'd arranged to meet Phyllis Folliette at the courthouse. I didn't know what the lawyer would look like, but she proved to be very easy to pick out. The second I saw her I knew she wasn't from Sarne. Phyllis Folliette was a tall woman in a dark green suit and bronze silk blouse, with beautiful cordovan leather pumps that matched her bag and her briefcase... even her hair. Somewhere in her forties, Folliette exuded confidence and intelligence. That was what we needed.
I felt almost embarrassed to approach someone who was so obviously a star. I think few women would feel very well groomed or attractive when they looked at this woman, and I was no exception. I was all too aware of my messy hair and my wrinkled pantsuit. I'd made the effort to pull "meet the client" clothes out of my suitcase, but I'd lacked the energy to iron them. With Phyllis Folliette so ably making a great impression, I regretted not having stuck with jeans.
"I'm glad to meet you," she said. "You've impressed Art Barfield, and that's saying something." She shook my hand and began to tell me what she'd learned in talking to the law enforcement people in Sarne. "I've been over to the jail," she said. "Something is up. For one thing, if they were taking the story about Montana warrants seriously, Mr. Lang would be appearing before a different court. I don't know how much you know about the legal system in Arkansas." She raised her eyebrows.
"Assume I'm ignorant," I said, which was pretty much the truth.
"They would never have arrested him for a broken taillight unless he did something else, like shove a cop or try to evade arrest, something like that. What gave the patrolman the juice to arrest Tolliver was the allegation that he had open warrants in Montana." That's what Art had said, too. "Now, if they were sticking by that story, your brother would be appearing in circuit court. But he's not. He's going to appear in the Sarne District Court, which only handles misdemeanors. You'll see when we get in there. We'll have to wait our turn, so you'll listen to lots of other charges against other people." Her brown eyes summed me up while she spoke.
"Harper, honey, you're very wired up," she said after a moment or two. "You need to try to relax."